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Two UM teams shortlisted for world-wide competition for education innovation

Two UM teams are shortlisted for the Wharton-QS Stars Reimagine Education Awards 2015. The first team, consisting of Catalina Goanta, Gwen Noteborn and Bram Akkermans of the Law faculty was nominated for their project ‘Implementing Wearables in the Classroom: Making IT Real’. The second project on the shortlist is titled ‘Connecting worlds: making virtual mobility work for the greater good’ and was submitted by Herco Fonteijn of the Faculty of Psychology and Neuroscience.

Making IT real

The project explains the benefits of implementing wearable technologies, such as Apple Watch and Google Glass, in training students 21st century skills in order to prepare them for the labour market. The development of procedural knowledge, next to the development of content knowledge, is one of the main aspects of this project.

Connecting worlds

This project shows how students in a WEIRD (western, educated, industrialized, rich, democratic) country share ideas with their fellow students at Padjadjaran University (Indonesia). It affords an internationalization-at-home experience for Indonesian students who do not have the means to engage in physical mobility. By focusing on humanitarian work and bringing together students from very different parts of the world, the assignment contributes to shaping an attitude of tolerance and respect, and to global citizenship, while students are invited to think critically about complex ethical issues. Students experience how people collaborate in modern organizations, learn how to communicate within teams with diverse compositions, to build and deepen swift trust, to use modern ICT tools, and to set up a short-term collaboration.

The Wharton-QS-Stars Reimagine Education Award is a world-wide competition to celebrate higher education innovation and is considered ‘The Oscars for pedagogical innovators’. The three finalists in each Award category as well as the overall winner and recipient of the US$ 50,000 cash prize, will be announced at the Wharton- QS Stars Reimagine Education Awards & Conference 2015, which will take place in Philadelphia, 7-9 December.

With well over 500 completed and excellent projects received, the competition has been fierce. The shortlisted project teams get the opportunity to present their projects at the Reimagine Education conference for an audience of Academics, university leaders, EdTech entrepreneurs, and venture capitalists (e.g: William Rankin, Director of Learning, Apple & Jaime Casap, Chief Education Evangelist, Google).